← The Devex Book Club
The Devex Book Club
The food paradox: Why those who feed us can't feed themselves with Roger Thurow
00:29:01
Summary Award-winning journalist Roger Thurow reveals how conventional farming practices are simultaneously depleting resources and failing millions of farmers worldwide. His investigation finds that many receiving food aid are actually food...
Loading summary
Transcript32 lines
- [00:04]
Roger Thurow
There are these multiple ways and routes to hold off this collision of nourishing us all and then preserving and protecting and healing the planet from the very consequences and actions of nourishing us.
- [00:17]
Rajkumar
I'm Rajkumar and you're in the Devex Book Club. Food security is one of the biggest challenges of our time, yet solutions often emerge from unexpected places. In against the Grain, Roger Thoreau shares powerful stories of farmers whose innovations and determination are transforming agriculture and the fight against hunger. Roger, it's great to have you here. Maybe we could just start with a little bit about what drew you to this after Camino journalism. What drew you to want to go so deep on agriculture, the connection with climate change, to kind of travel around, around the world and talk to farmers? What's the motivation?
- [00:56]
Roger Thurow
Well, thanks for having me on. It's a delight to talk to you. And yeah, as was after 30 years at the Wall Street Journal and 20 as a foreign correspondent. I was reporting on the famine in Ethiopia in 2003. 14 million to 1.4 million people were on the doorstep of starvation. And, you know, it was the first food crisis, the first great food crisis, the first famine of the 21st century. And that really struck me. And then eventually the food price crisis of 2007, 2008 was raging. There were writings, as you recall, in a number of countries at the time, over the high prices, the food shortages then, and a lot of people in governments around the world even asking, gee, what's happened to our food system and what's going on? And so then we decided, look, let's put all our reporting together and everything we know kind of about what's going on in the global agriculture, how that was impacting this abiding nature of hunger and malnutrition in the 21st century. And we put that together in a book. And that was the first book that we did, or that I did. Enough why the World's Poor Starve at an Age of Plenty. And I really liked the process of doing that book, the long, long form narrative journalism. But I figured it was time, yeah. To be able to take, to step back and take longer times and really spend time with people and, and, and the farmers and communities. And so that's why then left the Journal and then, you know, became with the Chicago Council and had the, the funding then and the support then to go off and do these, these other books.
- [02:30]
Rajkumar
And you are one of the very few reporters who's really on this beat, you know, and knows it so well. You talk about the, the food prices in 2007, 8. And I think it stretched out even a few years after that. A lot of that was export controls, you know, export controls on rice and other and other crops. So again, sort kind of decisions that led to that hunger. It seems like your book, this book, what Comes through, is a pretty big idea. I think that, that we in the global development community, we in the global ag field thought we had the answer to this problem with Norman Borlaug. We thought like this was. We figured out the green revolution, we knew what to do. And it turns out, you think we were long. We were just flat out wrong. And that's led to the position we're in today. I mean, is that, do you see it that way? That's to me the big idea that comes out of the book.
- [03:23]
Roger Thurow
Yes. Yeah, exactly. And great summary and thank you for that. You put it in kind of great terms and context. Yeah. Now we see kind of the consequences or after effects of some of that and the unintended consequences. So Borlaug wins the Nobel Peace Prize. Not a science prize, but the Peace Prize. Right. We pat ourselves on the back. We enter this period of kind of, you know, long term, of increasing agriculture production, you know, yields increasing, a great reduction in extreme poverty as farm incomes, particularly the smallholder farmers rose, even if it's just a little bit, you know, you know, so from going from $2 a day to five or $10 a day. And so it was like, okay, we're now entering this long, this period of, of kind of stable prices. And, you know, we kind of settled into this modern agriculture orthodoxy that had developed out of that. But it turns out that no, we not only didn't we have all the answers, we weren't even asking any questions. And certainly not the right questions. And so each chapter in the book is questions that the farmers themselves are asking and raising. And so I thought that was fascinating as I went from place to place, you know, kind of around the world, from the, from the Great Rift Valley in Africa to the Indo Gangetic Plain in India to the Central American highlands and into the Great Plains in the United States. Farmers, you know, seeing that their agriculture was turning against itself. And by their very actions of nourishing us all, they were finding then it was increasingly harder then to nourish in the future. So they found their lands degraded and their soils depleted and their waters dwindling, their forests disappearing, their pollinators fleeing, their biodiversity shrinking, rains becoming ever more mercurial, the temperatures ever hotter. And making the connections between all those Ecological events and environmental events with kind of their own agriculture and what they were doing. And so they're wondering, why would we continue to do that? As you mentioned, this great collision between humanities, so nourishing us all and at the same time saving, preserving, healing our planet from the very consequences and actions of nourishing us and realizing that, yeah, agriculture in the process of nourishing us puts a tremendous strain, it takes a toll on our environment.
- [05:42]
Rajkumar
It seems like you're saying it's almost like an industrial revolution mindset was brought to farming where you'd say, how do we maximize yield? The same way you might try to maximize, I don't know, the number of cars you can get through a factory. And you'd say, well, we're not going to try to grow everything, we're just going to grow the one thing grows best here where there's the biggest market, you know, large scale mechanization, pump in water and pesticides and, you know, herbicides and you know, just maximize that yield. And maybe it works for a while. I mean, you certainly talked about the story of the Great Plains in the United States where a lot of that had really dramatically worked. But eventually the logic of it breaks down and you tell the story of a farmer who was sort of tempted by what he saw around him into cutting down a lot of trees and growing sugar cane. I think it was in Uganda, if I'm remembering right. And I mean, just tell us a little bit what he went through thinking like again that he was going to do the right thing for his family. And what was the story there? What happened?
- [06:48]
Roger Thurow
Yeah, so here, so he's a farmer in, you know, Uganda, a young man family, I think, four children. He was struggling somewhat of the farming that he was doing. And so he's, he's doing some planting in the wetlands along the Nile and the shores of the Nile and then some also then what they'll say, more highland farming where he's growing maize and some beans, he's grazing some cattle in amongst the trees and in the forests that are there. And then here comes the sugarcane industry. And so they move in and they're talking to the farmers and they're saying, oh, hey, yeah, so you grow sugar cane and, and sign contracts with you and then, you know, the riches will flow from the sugarcane. And so he's listening to all that, seen other farmers get into that and figuring, yeah, so if I'm looking ahead and I want to educate my four children and send them to high school at least, but he's all thinking ahead for that. And so he figures, okay, I'm going to go into the sugarcane as well. And so he has about seven or eight acres, some of it forested and wooded. And he learns quickly that, okay, sugarcane does not get along well with trees. So first thing we have to do is cut down the trees and the bushes and the shrubs and everything. So he does that. There's termite mounds that are there. And then he also learns, well, sugarcane doesn't get along with termites as some other crops do, because they. The work that they do in the soil, you know, it kind of being in coexistence with some of the crops that they're growing. And so he kind of, you know, pours whatever pesticide and insecticide down the termite mounds. And so the termites then go. And so he figures, okay, now I'm set. So he plants his sugar can. And there in that area, it's maybe 18 months for the first crop for. To mature for the first crop, 18 months to two years. So he's planted. He's watching the sugar cane come up. And then in that time, all of a sudden, he and other farmers get noticed that from the sugarcane factories, oh, hey, we're full. Because some of the early farmers, they're supplying these factories. It's like, yeah, we have full capacity. We're not going to buy your sugar cane. And so he's like, well, now what do I do? So he's trying to look around for other markets, maybe to export it to Kenya. And it's like, oh, well, I can't get an export permit, so what am I going to do? So he's worried about that. Then he gets a call one night from one of the neighboring farmers that says, hey, your sugarcane field is on fire. He's like, what? And so he runs out to a sugarcane field, sees that it's on fire. And so the farmers had started then, like, sabotaging other farmers, their competitors. He was like, everybody's now growing the sugar cane, and the sugar cane factories are full. They're not taking my sugar, my cane, you know, what are we going to do? So he loses everything. And so these dreams of riches. And he figured, you know, calculated that he would have, you know, his income would have jumped, you know, remarkably by switching to sugarcane as opposed to the other, the traditional kind of farming that he had been doing. And so when I see him, it's maybe a couple of years after that, and he uses the word regret frequently. Like within a couple of minutes, he uses it like six or Seven times. And he said, yeah, man, we've done this to ourselves. And he can see the environmental changes that are coming. He says, you know, it's really hot, it's much drier, right? And then realizing that, yeah, the trees help drive the precipitation cycle and everything. And it's like we've done this to ourselves. And so what he's done is going back and he is reestablishing his land and the bushes growing and the shrubs and some of the trees and planting kind of the faster growing variety of trees. And he points to the distance and he says, see that tree line over there? I've left them there to remind me. These are trees that we had, that we had before. And it was like a very sobering impact to them.
- [10:25]
Jenniley Ravello / Kate Warren
The world is facing a range of health threats, from an increase in disease outbreaks to the health impacts of climate change. I'm Jenniley Ravello, senior global health reporter for devex. Every Thursday, we bring you exclusive news and insights on how the health sector is finding solutions to these challenges in our free weekly newsletter, Devex checkup. Visit devex.comnewsletters to subscribe.
- [10:55]
Rajkumar
That's kind of part of what made me think of the Industrial revolution and even like, you know, today's modern industrial revolution. You read stories about old mill towns that were, you know, steel mill towns and then, well, somewhere else in the world became more competitive to make steel. And so these jobs that people thought are going to be around forever, they disappear and car factories or you name the industry history. And it made me feel that way too, hearing his story, because in some ways what he's trying to go back to, and you give a lot of other examples in the book of people who are now growing, you know, a really diversified array of crops that can support their family to kind of try to go back to prioritizing resilience, maybe above yield alone. Not that they don't want yield, but it's not. That's not the only thing that they're looking for some kind of resilience in life that, you know, our modern economy in general, not just in agriculture, but has taken away from a lot of people.
- [11:51]
Roger Thurow
Yeah. Oh, exactly. This is what struck me in that the famine In Ethiopia in 2003, the tipping point into famine was the drought that was spreading across the Horn of Africa and then, you know, elsewhere through East Africa and then into the south, into South Africa, into Southern Africa. But what had preceded that in the previous couple of years were these acts of, the acts of man in terms of the Politics that you were talking about, kind of the economic decisions, where the priorities were. And after coming out of the history of Ethiopia, say from the famine of 1984, 85, which those of us of a certain age remember as kind of a shock. So kind of coming out of that and kind of other hunger crises as they then developed in the subsequent years from that, there was the effort then and his determination to put the focus on production, as you say, in yield, produce, produce, produce, neglecting kind of the marketing, then that would have to go, finding markets, the shifts in the economies that would then have to go on when that production actually happened. So there you see then by say 2000, 2001, 2002, the production really ramps up and then there's all these surpluses. Well, how do we now deal with the surpluses? They hadn't really opened up export markets in Ethiopia. You know, there was no commodity exchange because when there was all this surplus production, there was no markets for it. Then the prices collapsed and the farmers, their incentive to farm and produce these surpluses then evaporated.
- [13:27]
Rajkumar
Yeah, I guess, I wonder because I've talked to people who are on kind of both sides of maybe what you could call a pretty strong debate around regenerative agriculture, however you want to term this approach to agriculture, which is sort of going back to nature. And I get people who tell me this is the only way. We've tried the other way, we've tried this modern orthodoxy, you know, we have to change, we gotta go back. And then I get others who say, no, there's, you know, there's no way you're gonna get to feed enough people if you're not using modern agricultural approaches. You've gotta use, you know, improved seeds and you've gotta use a lot of fertilizer. And they talk about, I've had experts talk to me about the soil differences around the world and say, look, in some of these places the soil is just really depleted. You need to bring in fertilizer and there's just no other way.
- [14:14]
Roger Thurow
I guess.
- [14:14]
Rajkumar
I wonder, did you come out after talking to all these, these farmers strongly in the view that, you know, we've just got to take a more nature based approach, a more regenerative approach, or you think there's a middle ground here?
- [14:26]
Roger Thurow
Yeah, I think what I came down on is really needing to pay heed to the farmers and what they're saying and farmers of all sorts, I mean, not just, you know, the, the, the certainly the smallholder farmers and the indigenous farmers and the family farmers, but Then realizing that, well, yeah, there are some places in the world, as you were mentioning, where, you know, some of this farming where it is beneficial and where it still works and that, yes, in some parts of the world, where it's appropriate is still. Is still necessary. So it's like the problem with an. With kind of the orthodoxy is that you kind of just pow, straight ahead with that and you dismiss everything else. Right. And so, as I said that the questions and the people that were asking the questions then were kind of roundly dismissed. It's like nutrition, although there's now more focus on it, that nutrition had been so woefully neglected. Right. So less than 1% of all, you know, development aid in agriculture aid, you know, goes into the nutrition. And it's like, well, that's crazy. Isn't that what agriculture is about? But the focus wasn't on the people that are eating the crops. It was on the ones that are growing the crops.
- [15:30]
Rajkumar
And if it was on the ones eating, it was just about calories. It wasn't about micronutrients and, like, actually having a nutritious diet. It was just, did they get enough food, which is way too low of a bar. Obviously you need micronutrients to live.
- [15:45]
Roger Thurow
Exactly. So we end up with the situation where, yeah, the produce, produce, produce notion then, that the more food that we produced in the world, kind of the sicker we all became or the unhealthier we became. Not only us as people, you know, as we look at then the nutritional aspects and dietary issues then becoming like the leading cause of deaths around the world or contributors to the deaths and diseases, so not only for human health, but then also for planetary health and kind of how that all goes together. And just to basically, you know, examine this and look at this collision of these two imperatives and to say, you know, look, it's not. It's not this way or this way. It's somehow, you know, to kind of listen to the farmers, listen to nature and what that's saying, what the farmers and what people are taking from that. And how do we find a way then, that we are able to continue to advance, to grow enough food, grow enough nutritious food for that relentless imperative to continue to nourish us all, but at the same time, then to nourish the planet and, you know, improve the health not only of the people, but also the. The. The. The planet that we. That we live on.
- [16:56]
Rajkumar
The fact that there is innovation even in regenerative agriculture, just maybe a different kind of innovation is the story you tell of the, the grass used to feed dairy cows, it's an indigenous grass, I think it's called Bracharya. Is that right? And, and maybe just tell us a little bit about that story because it's a remarkable story of how it, it, the, the grass was used as bedding material for slaves and slave ships coming out of Africa. And then tell us what the rest, what happened from there.
- [17:24]
Roger Thurow
Yeah, so that gets popular in the New World. You know, there's some Australian farmers and researchers, they develop it down there. And so it kind of goes into wider use in Australia, in Brazil, somewhat in the United States. And in all this time afterwards decades, it's now back in Africa. And so the International Livestock Research Institute, they plant some on their test plots in, outside in the area of Nairobi. But then it's becoming a much more popular crop because they find, look, it, it'll, it'll increase the milk production, you know, maybe twice or, or triple the amount they're. They're doing the research. Does it have maybe also an impact that the methane, it will lower the methane emissions of these cows? And so because of this better fodder, you have kind of these, these victories or triumphs on a couple of fronts. But yeah, the moral of that is that the crops that we would call the traditional crops, the indigenous crops that then have become neglected or orphan crops, right, that have, you know, literally been plowed under or pushed aside by this wave of modern industrial orthodoxy, they, you know, are used to the soils and the conditions here and our climates. And so it's then bringing them back into, into play and production and into popularity. It's like Carrie Fowler from the State Department and that's one of the big things that, that he talks about. He calls them, I think, opportunity crops. They've been neglected, they've been orphaned, but they're opportunity crops. So, so these are the crops that then provide this great potential. And then also. So the closing part of the book then is with the Sikangu Lakota community, the Native American community in South Dakota on the Rosebud Reservation and their efforts to recapture and re. Establish their food sovereignty.
- [19:05]
Rajkumar
I think they're even growing, they're even growing bananas in South Dakota.
- [19:08]
Roger Thurow
You talk about, well, they, they have it in their hot house or their, their, their greenhouse, a geodesic dome, just to show here' possibilities are right. So there's that and then fig trees and some other things. And it's like. So these are, you know, obviously those would be available in the stores, but at higher prices. And so it's like we have to reestablish our food sovereignty. And, you know, they go back then back to their traditional ways of growing, which is basically what regenerative agriculture is. And so we have to remember from them that. So all the talk now of regenerative agriculture, it's not new, right? It's not something that's coming from the labs now or from or from the ag multinational companies now. This is things that they had done. Right? And so I think that, you know, to your question of kind of what I come down as after this reporting and doing this book is that, yeah, there are these multiple ways and routes and let's examine them and deploy all of them or the ones that we think are appropriate to hold off this collision of nourishing us all and then preserving and protecting and healing the planet from the very consequences and actions of nourishing us.
- [20:25]
Jenniley Ravello / Kate Warren
Hi, I'm Kate Warren, executive editor at devex. If you are listening to this podcast, you are likely working to achieve the sustainable development goals. But are you subscribed to DEVEX Newswire? Global development can be a fast moving, complex sector. Our team of global reporters work every day to bring you the news you need to make sense of it all. In devex Newswire, we keep you up to date on issues ranging from climate change financing to gender equality and global health, to transforming the food system, all in a fun to read free newsletter delivered directly to you five days a week. Join the hundreds of thousands of global development professionals who receive Devex Newswire and visit devex.comnewsletters to sign up to this free newsletter today.
- [21:13]
Rajkumar
In that conclusion, you come to what's your assessment of kind of where the global agriculture community is today? Are they converging on that idea? You know, you talk a lot in the book about programs through the World Food Program, many other research institutes and NGOs. You know, there's a lot of people in this space and as I said, some of them have very divergent views. Are they. Are people coming to your view or do you feel like this idea of, you know, let's get rid of orthodoxy, let's figure out what works, let's talk to farmers. How radical is that idea at this point?
- [21:44]
Roger Thurow
Yeah, I think hopefully becoming more conventional as opposed to radical. And again, it's so it's not just my view, but it's these views of what I've kind of, you know, through my reporting, then bring them together of the views and the practices and the wisdom that these farmers around the world have in various settings and kind of looking at their, their situations and, and, and, you know, their landscapes and soil conditions and climate and what's best for this. And I hope there's like an, an acceleration of that. And so you find, you know, there's, there's a number of other books that are being then written by farmers themselves and stories being told by farmers themselves of, hey, here's what we're doing with new grazing practices, with new, you know, cropping methods, with new harvesting methods, you know, with different techniques to care for the soil. So I think kind of the, the prioritizing soils is really gaining ground and there's a momentum behind that and an acceleration of that, that it's not, it's not just one way, but we gotta look at all these, these different ways of getting to this prospect and imperative. There's no way around it of kind of holding off this collision right, between nourishing us and healing our planet. And that's a task then for the world's farmers and for global agriculture that because of the role of agriculture, that the farmers in agriculture are on the front lines of all of this. They are feeling first and foremost the impacts of changes to the climate.
- [23:14]
Rajkumar
You mentioned something like, majority of climate refugees are themselves farmers.
- [23:19]
Roger Thurow
Yes. Are themselves farmers. The majority, and this has been the case for a long time of the majority of people around the world that are receiving food aid are farmers. And so this whole notion of hungry farmers and becomes this cruel oxymoron in the world, how can that be? And so it's, yeah, kind of the things that they're doing and an emphasis of prioritizing them and listening to them. So it's their views right then are hopefully coming more into play. They're seeing that they're on the front lines of incurring the damages and the negative forces that's coming then from changing climate. And then they're realizing, oh yeah, we're also some of the big contributors to this.
- [24:03]
Rajkumar
We cut down some of the trees. Our practices are part of what's leading to this.
- [24:07]
Roger Thurow
Yeah. And there's kind of an array of research and a number of scientists and environmentalists and economists that then calculate that, yeah, maybe like as much as a third of the greenhouse gases emitted in the world are coming from agriculture and land use and from the cutting down of trees, from the, from the methane emissions from other practices of agriculture. And it's like, so that's then what these farmers are finding that, wow, kind of our own actions are contributing to this. And isn't That a really strange prospect that we need to change and what are we doing to ourselves, and then also that we have. We have the ability to do something about it.
- [24:45]
Rajkumar
Well, that might be the most important part about the book, maybe the most radical part about the book. Just as we wrap here, that you actually talk to farmers themselves. I mean, that's, you know, we've talked as journalists to so many people with strong views on this, on these issues, but actually going and talking to a large number of farmers like you did, hearing it from their mouths, in their words, I think is a really important contribution to the conversation. I think it's an important book for that reason. And I really appreciate you writing it and you bringing it here and being a part of this conversation.
- [25:17]
Roger Thurow
Well, thank you. And thanks for your recognition of that, your very kind words. And so I think journalists, one of the things that we need to do more of, that we don't do well enough, is going back and going back to places, communities, to people that we have written about before and spent time with before. And well, whatever happened to that? Whatever happened to the situation that we were writing about? It was important that we were there at some stage to meet with them, to speak with them, to write about them, to broadcast, to record their experiences. Then, well, whatever happened to that? And that can be a good measuring stick of where we are then in the world. So when you ask, go. So, like, where are we in the world in global agriculture? And what direction is this moving? You know, by going back and then seeing. So in 2003, in that famine, it was the humanitarian crisis, right? And catastrophe of 14 million people. Then when I'm beginning to start the reporting on this book, I went back to my notes from that time. And I'm like a pack rat when it comes to keeping all my notes through the years and in my notebooks, I'm seeing that in addition to the reporting on the famine and the impacts on the people and the conversations that I have with mothers and fathers and farmers, we're farmers and we have these malnourished and starving children. And in my notes then was seeing their recognition that, wow, the land is so degraded, the prospects of these farmers ever being able to nourish themselves and their communities and their families is so diminished that we are going to have to be here forever providing relief assistance if we also don't do something about the environment and their growing and their agriculture conditions. So that's where they were then. Starting with some of these regenerative practices of telling the farmers, look, let Your land lie fallow for a while, it needs to be terraced to hold the rain. So then here we are. When I go back all this time later, it's going back to some of the places and some of the farmers and some of the families, but then also to these areas where they were doing the regenerative agriculture already. And there you could then see the difference. This is what can happen when those techniques and things are then put into play. And the emphasis is on, yes, growing and production, but also on the environment and the ecology and the microclimates and everything that will then facilitate that. So it's not just the emphasis on produce, produce, produce, but it's like what can we do to all the natural allies of agriculture that will make that production possible? And so that going back, I think is also really, really important.
- [27:55]
Rajkumar
You're so right. And you bring that out, you bring it to life. In the book you can see the stories and they're, they definitely illuminate this conversation. It's been great to spend some time with you. Roger, thank you for doing this.
- [28:05]
Roger Thurow
Thanks, thanks, thanks for your questions and yeah, leading the way and asking questions and all the work that you do at Deving. So thank you for that.
- [28:11]
Rajkumar
Thanks. Roger Thoreau is an award winning journalist and author. His latest book is against the Grain How Farmers around the Globe Are Transforming Agriculture to Nourish the World and Heal the Planet. You can follow him on LinkedIn at. Roger Thoreau, thank you for joining. The DEVEX Book Club is produced by Kayleigh Mundeva with special assistance from Margaret Richardson. If you want to know more about these topics, don't forget to subscribe to the DEVEX newswire at the link in the comments where you'll get today's top global development, breaking news, analysis and opinion. Until then, do good out there and thanks for joining.